At first glance, they look like any other couple walking in the woods. But, they rarely look up while they wander through the trees. They stop often to push at pine needles with their waterproof boots. A closer look reveals a knife curled between fingers that are darkened with dirt.

It's hunting time: the mushrooms are up.

The coastal season for mushrooms starts a few weeks after the first soaking rain in the fall and winds down in March, said Phil Carpenter, the "prime minister" of the Santa Cruz Fungal Federation, founded in 1984. Although there are several thousand varieties of mushrooms that grow in California, most foragers in Monterey County are "pot pickers," searching for porcinis and chantrelles to eat, he said.

"Mushroom hunting brings out the hunter-gather instinct in people," Carpenter said. "There's also an adolescent, treasure hunt aspect to it that gets people excited."

It's the second trip to Pebble Beach in the last two weeks for Vlad and Ines Dvorkin. The Hayward residents have trekked to the Peninsula for the past three years after friends introduced them to the area. Mushroom picking is a tradition in Russia, their homeland, they said.

Most people know that mushrooms are a fungus. The fleshy part that people search for above the ground is the "fruiting body" — the reproductive part — of the fungus, like an apple is to a tree, said Carpenter. Each mushroom species has a different flavor and texture.

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Although it seems like mushrooms sprout up everywhere, they grow in very specific places, based on their role in nature. Some mushrooms are parasites, growing off the trunks of trees. Other mushrooms are "saprophytes," showing up where they can break down organic material. The chantrelles and porcinis have a mutual relationship with the trees they grow near, absorbing water above the tree roots and putting nutrients back into the soil. Chantrelles only grow close to oak trees. Porcinis set up camp near the pines.

"Everybody has their favorite spot to find them," said Mickey Davi, a Peninsula resident who came out to Del Monte Forest to forage with her husband, Sebastian. They've hunted the same places for more than 10 years, they said. But they only want porcinis. On a good day they'll go home with three or four of the thick, brown mushrooms, to be cooked right away or dried and savored later.

"It's important to know exactly what you're looking for, and it takes an expert to tell the difference between the good mushrooms and the bad ones," said Stuart Heard, executive director of California Poison Control Services. It's better to buy mushrooms at the store, he said.

This year, 766 people have called the center after exposure to mushrooms. Of those, 42 people had moderate symptoms, such as vomiting, diarrhea and stomach cramps. But three residents at a care facility in Loomis died after eating soup prepared with wild mushrooms. Those numbers also reflect only people who called the Poison Control Center and don't necessarily include people who went directly to hospitals, Heard said. Last year 836 mushroom exposures were confirmed, with one death.

Carpenter is one of the experts area hospitals call when they suspect mushroom poisoning. When it starts raining, his phone starts ringing. Thursday night's call came from Salinas, after a woman cooked up a mushroom from her back yard, he said. Fortunately, the mushroom wasn't a deadly one.

Although most poisonous mushrooms cause only moderate illness — stomach cramps, vomiting or diarrhea — some are severely toxic.

The amanita phalloides, also called the death cap, is responsible for most of the mushroom-related deaths in Northern California. Just one mushroom can be toxic enough to cause death by liver failure. But it can cause so much dehydration from vomiting and diarrhea that kidney failure often happens first, said Todd Mitchell, a physician who specializes in mushroom poisoning at Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz.

The most dangerous thing about amanita poisoning is that it can take hours before signs of sickness occur, Mitchell said. But toxins are still harming the body, even before the vomiting and diarrhea begin.

Until Mitchell began importing an antidote from Germany, there was no specific treatment available for this mushroom poisoning. The antidote, a milk thistle extract, stops the liver from being harmed long enough for it to recover, along with supportive care, he said. But even the antidote can't save everyone.

The Food and Drug Administration granted Mitchell permission to use the injectable intravenous antidote after he treated a family in liver failure from eating tacos prepared with wild mushrooms in 2007. More than 60 patients have since been treated with this antidote.

It's not just people who get poisoned from mushrooms. Pets are susceptible, too. There were 48 pet exposure calls to the Poison Control Center this year.